And thanks to a generous matching gift, your gift today is worth double. So your tax-deductible donation of $50 is worth $100 to Heritage, and your gift of $100 is worth $200.

Triumphant liberals have already spelled out their plans:

On the campaign trail, liberal candidates called for tax increases, massive new government health care programs, drastic new environmental controls and more.

Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts said, "we'll have to raise taxes ultimately" as a result of liberal spending increases. He also wants to cut defense spending by a quarter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she supports re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine-an onerous regulation that could silence conservatives on talk radio.

Liberals of all stripes have pledged to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, a handout to big labor that eliminates the secret ballot in unionization elections.

The Heritage Foundation is ready to stand up to this challenge. We will not stray from our mission to fight for the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

We are ready to fight back against the liberals and advance our conservative principles. We will build on our 35-year record of success-from welfare reform to missile defense to tax cuts-and help get America back on track.

But we need your help if we are to raise $80,000 by November 15 to make this possible. Will you stand with us?

After a hard-fought campaign nearly two years in the making, last night a candidate was elected president of the United States. That candidate promised to “cut taxes for 95% of workers and their families,” expand the Army by 65,000 and the Marines by 27,000, and enact “a net spending cut” for the federal government. Lower taxes, a strong defense and shrinking the size of government. These are core conservative beliefs. Anyone who claims yesterday’s election was the end of conservatism simply was not paying attention to the campaign.

Despite a political environment that heavily favored the party of the left, Barack Obama still managed only a 5-point margin of victory. Compare that to a true conservative, Ronald Reagan, who bested his liberal opponents by 9 points in 1980 and by 18 points in 1984. According to last night’s exit polls, Americans who voted yesterday are 34% conservative, 44% moderate and only 22% liberal. As Newsweek admitted earlier this year: “Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal.”

There is no doubt the Republican Party has lost its way. Non-defense federal spending has risen 3.74% under President Bush compared to 2.93% under President Bill Clinton and 1% under Reagan. Federal spending now tops $25,000 per household annually, and the coming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs threaten to add another $12,000 per household per year. Conservatives have a lot of work to do.

One of the many tasks conservatives will happily perform is making sure Obama keeps his promises to lower taxes, strengthen the military and cut spending. The Los Angeles Times reports: “[S]ome Democrats are already debating whether Obama’s promised middle-class tax cut should be scaled back to lessen the hit to the budget. ‘He should be able to persuade the country that some promises are going to have to be put on hold,’ said Will Marshall of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.” In just 76 days, we are going to start finding out if the next president’s actions will match his rhetoric.

According to federal election law, any presidential campaign that participates in public financing is automatically audited after an election. When Barack Obama broke his promise to the American people by forgoing the public financing system, his campaign became the first since public financing became law to have a chance of not being audited. Federal law does still allow the Federal Election Commission to audit a presidential campaign that doesn’t participate in public financing, but at least four of the six FEC commissioners must first vote to pursue an investigation “for cause.” No doubt there is great “cause” to be concerned about Obama’s fundraising efforts.

Late last month, the venerable and independent National Journal tested reports that the Obama campaign’s online fundraising system was built to facilitate fraud. Veteran journalist Neil Munro bought two pre-paid American Express gift cards worth $25 each to donate to the Obama and McCain campaigns online. Munro purchased the cards with cash and then accessed the Obama and McCain campaign websites from a public library in Fairfax, Va. The Obama campaign’s site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign’s site rejected it. Contacted by National Journal, the McCain campaign explained its system rejected the donation because American Express could not verify that the donor lived at the address given with the online contribution.

Contacted to explain why its campaign accepted the donation despite the existence of any safeguards, the Obama campaign replied by e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.” But Juan Proano, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’ presidential primary campaign, told the Washington Post it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security. “Honestly, you want to have the least amount of hurdles in processing contributions quickly,” Proano said.

Obama’s donation fraud facilitation does not end there. Pressed by National Journal to explain why the campaign failed to identify hundreds of thousands of low-dollar donors, the Obama campaign responded that it “would be a pretty hard thing for us to be able to process.” National Journal responds:

But there is much widely used and inexpensive technology that allows Republican and Democratic campaigns to sort and identify millions of donors and to highlight or exclude overseas contributors. The technology is offered by companies that complete credit card transactions, by banks that provide credit cards to customers, by telecommunications companies that maintain digital networks, and by a variety of smaller firms that track Internet activity. … [A] five-minute phone call to Bank of America’s merchant-services department showed how a campaign could sort transactions to identify any credit cards that were used to make small donations under fake names and fake addresses. The campaign could download transaction data from the bank’s Web site and transfer the file into a database, such as Excel, said the Bank of America employee. “Then highlight all your transactions and click your sort button,” the employee said.

So there you have it. Instead of making a 5-minute phone call to protect the integrity of U.S. elections, the Obama campaign did nothing. This is exactly the same approach the campaign has taken toward ACORN’s massive and well-established voter registration fraud campaign. Hear no evil, see no evil. ACORN takes a zero-effort approach to preventing vote fraud during its registration drives. Nate Toller, who headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, told John Fund: “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances.” And Anita MonCrief, another ACORN whistleblower, agrees: “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes. I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”

Already Obama and Democrat staffers have been forced to resign for registering and casting ballots in more than one state. If Americans are ever to trust the electoral process again, a full investigation and audit of Obama and ACORN are an absolute necessity.

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